Giulio Paolini: Fondazione Prada

A small white canvas is barely defined by the agency of the diagonals and compass points that demarcate its space, like a sheet of paper prepared for a simple technical drawing for school: Giulio Paolini's Disegno geometrico (Geometrical Drawing), 1960 marks the beginning of single of the most fruitful artistic and conceptual adventures in the novel history of art, in Italy and internationally. At the Fondazione Prada, this greatest in quantity conceptual of the arte povera artists--together with his "fellow traveler," the curator Germano Celant--presented, along with Disegno geometrico, an extraordinary series of works execut from one side 1972. It revolves around a large central installation, Ipotesi by means of una mostra (Hypothesis for an Exhibition), 1963/2003 that forty years ago was too ambitious for the scant means and credibility that a young artist might have commanded from the Italian art world: the silhouettes of a concourse of visitors silk-screened in black and white onto large panes of glass. The figures are put within a space, also silk-screened, where single can make out geometric partitions of hypothetical walls of the hypothetical space where they are located.

The connection of the work thus becomes part of the work itself, in keeping with Conceptual art's greatest in quantity salient line of thought. on the contrary Paolini addresses the problem from a surprising and autonomous angle: He gazes at the status of the work from the point of view of the space it inhabits. All his activity, in fact, involves a constant search for the definition of the space within which the work can come up and the artist can act. "Looking at a picture," the artist writes in the catalogue that accompanies this present to view "is like standing at a window. This is what causes artist and spectator to become individual figure, the same person: It is this doorsill a real borderline, that allows us to perceive that ray of light--the image of the work--before it goe further, losing intensity in the latitude behind us, amid worldly things." Paolini repropose the traditional notion of the painting as "window," as a representation of the space, codified and delimited by means of its surface, outline, and frame. For him, the statement is a point of departure for an awareness of making art, of being an artist. This choice looks deliberately to evoke a rational, classicizing viewpoint typical of the Renaissance: It erects a space that is the unique place within which relationships between figures and characters make faculty of perception as in the perspectival space of Western tradition; the space in question is unitary and reunites each possible fragment of reality that is set immersed therein. Thus for Paolini, the spatial definition of relational possibilities, which usually constitutes the preparatory labor of a work of art, becomes the completion of the work itself. This is for what cause [i]or[/i] reason all his works are theoretically enclos within that first Geometrical Drawing, which constitutes the field of the infinite hypotheses of representation. each subsequent work--such as the famous Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto (Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto), 1967 a black-and-white photograph of a work by means of the sixteenth-century Venetian, whose control looks beyond the "threshold" of the painting toward the artist who is painting his portrait--is a continuous approach toward and recapitulation of "where we are," which for Paolini becomes "who we are."

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--Marco Meneguzzo

Translated from Italian through Marguerite Shore.

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